Myths of the Cherokee (James Mooney)

Background

Cherokee People

The Cherokee people,
who call themselves "Tsalagi," are the largest Native American group
in the United States today. They originally lived in the Appalachian
mountains in what are now the southeastern United States:
Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and further south. The first encounter between
European people and the Cherokee people took place when Hernando
de Soto landed
in Florida and then traveled throughout the southern United States in 1540 and
1541, searching for gold.

Contact with Europeans proved devastating for the Cherokee,
particularly in the 18th century, when smallpox ravaged the population; it is
estimated that approximately half of the Cherokee population died in a smallpox
outbreak in 1738-39. In the early 19th century, the surviving Cherokee population
was limited to a a remnant of their former territories,
largely confined to the south Tennessee and north Georgia.

In 1817, missionaries came to the Cherokee, teaching Christianity,
as well as promoting the use of the English language. In order to promote the
use of Cherokee instead of English, Sequoyah
created a special syllabary
for written
Cherokee. Thanks to this Cherokee writing system, newspapers and
other publications began appearing in Cherokee in the 1820's. In 1827, the Cherokee
declared themselves to be the "Cherokee Nation", with a constitution
and a democratically elected government whose capital was in New
Echota, Georgia.

But in 1830, the US Congress passed the "Indian
Removal Act" which compelled Indians living east of the Mississippi
to move west. After years of legal and political protest by the Cherokee,
the US Army began its invasion of the Cherokee nation in 1838, driving
the people into stockades.
Then, during the winter of 1839, the Cherokee were marched to Oklahoma;
this march is called today the "Trail
of Tears." In Cherokee it is called
"Nunna daul Tsuny", "The Trail Where They Cried". Thousands
of Cherokee people died along the Trail of Tears, and only a small population
of Cherokee people escaped the relocation and remained in the east. In Oklahoma,
the Cherokee set up a new capital in Tahlequah.
In 1990, there were 370,000 Cherokee living in the United states, mostly
in the western states, with a small remnant (approximately 6000 people) in
the
"eastern band" living in North Carolina.

James Mooney

James
Mooney was born in Richmond,
Indiana in 1861. His parents
were Irish immigrants. From his childhood, Mooney was fascinated by Native American
culture, and in 1885 he began his lifelong career as an anthropologist (ethnologist)
for the Smithsonian
Institute. Mooney is best known for his book-length report
following the massacre
at Wounded Knee, "The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of
1890," which was published by the Smithsonian in 1896. The Ghost-Dance
was a revivalist religion that had spread throughout many Indian tribes in the
1880's, centered on the Paiute messiah figure named Wovoka. Here is how Mooney
described his research on the Ghost-Dance following the Wounded Knee massacre:

In the fall of 1890, the author was preparing to go to Indian
Territory, under the auspices of the Bureau of Ethnology, to continue research
among the Cherokee, when the Ghost dance began to attract attention, and permission
was asked and received to investigate that subject also among the wilder tribes
in the western part of the territory. [...] The first visit of about four
months (December 1890-April 1891) was made to the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa,
Comanche, Apache, Caddo, and Wichita, all living together in the western part
of what was then Indian Territory, but is now Oklahoma. [...] After returning
and attending to the labeling and arranging of the collection, a study was
made of all documents bearing on the subject in possession of the Indian Office
and the War Department. Another trip was then made to the field for the purpose
of investigating the dance among the Sioux, where it had attracted the most
attention, and among the Paiute, where it originated. On this journey the
author visited the Omaha, Winnebago, Sioux of Pine Ridge, Paiute, Cheyenne,
and Arapaho; met and talked with the messiah himself, and afterward, on the
strength of this fact, obtained from the Cheyenne the original letter containing
his message and instructions to the southern tribes. This trip occupied another
three months. [Mooney describes other trips in conjunction with this study.]
The field investigation therefore occupied twenty-two months, involving nearly
32,000 miles of travel and more or less time spent with about 20 tribes. To
obtain exact knowledge of the ceremony, the author took part in the dance
among the Arapaho and Cheyenne. He also carried a kodak and a tripod camera,
with which he made photographs of the dance and the trance both without and
within the circle. From the beginning every effort was made to get a correct
statement of the subject.

As Mooney's account shows, he was both a scientist and a bureaucrat
- and he was also deeply involved himself with the tribes whose activities he
was struggling to document, given the means available to him at the time. You
can read online a fascinating article by Thomas W. Kavanagh about Mooney's original
photographs and the photographs and illustrations as they were published in
the Ghost-Dance book: Imaging
and Imagining the Ghost Dance: James Mooney's Illustrations and Photographs.
Many of the Cherokee photographs in this week's image
gallery were taken by Mooney in 1888.

After his research on the Ghost-Dance, Mooney focused his
attention on the Cherokee, and he lived with the eastern band of the Cherokee
from 1887 until 1890. The result was another Smithsonian publication, "The
Myths of the Cherokee" which is the source for this week's readings. Mooney
also published "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee" which is a record,
in Cherokee and in English translation, of the ritual practices of a Cherokee
shamanic healer.

James Mooney continued his study of Native American religious
traditions throughout his life. In the 1890's he began working closely with
the Kiowa in Oklahoma, and employed many Kiowa artists who created the Kiowa
drawings which are in the Smithsonian collections. You can also see some
pages from Mooney's
notebooks online at the Smithsonian.

Mooney was instrumental in the founding of the Native
American Church, which was incorporated in Oklahoma City in 1918. The Native American
Church attempts to blend Native American religious practices with Christian
beliefs. The Church is controversial for many reasons, and James Mooney's involvement
in the establishment of the Church has made him a controversial figure as well.
Among Cherokees, there are disputes about how "authentic" it is to
promote this pan-Indian religion. As far as the United States government is
concerned, the Church is controversial because of its ritual use of peyote,
a practice which has often been subject to federal prosecution. In 1970, the
federal government granted special recognition for the use of peyote in the
rituals of the Native American Church, but in 1990 the Supreme Court removed
federal protection for these practices, and the Church now falls under the jurisdiction
of state laws.
The Church has approximately 250,000 members today, throughout the western United
States.

Mooney died in 1921; at the time of his death, he was working
on a study of Kiowa and Kiowa
Apacheheraldry traditions.